What the deuce? Fox's copyright club quashes videos and streams of Family Guy mobile game

Above: The Quest for Stuff enables players to build their own versions of Quahog.

Image Credit: TinyCo

Always make sure you get permission from your corporate overlords before attempting to promote or share one of their products with others.

Multimedia conglomerate Fox and Tiny Village developer TinyCo are about to release Family Guy: The Quest for Stuff for iOS, but gamers started downloading that city-management game this morning when it briefly appeared on the App Store. Naturally, as they are wont to do, fans started making videos of the Quahog simulator on YouTube and Twitch. Fox, who has since removed the game from Apple’s market, responded to these fan videos by filing copyright claims to get the videos removed, as TouchArcade first spotted.

The Quest for Stuff is a free-to-play game similar to publisher Electronic Arts’ popular and lucrative mobile release The Simpsons: Tapped Out. It’s set to go live tomorrow, and Fox wants fans to wait until then before they start sharing videos. It asked YouTube user Hans Kaosu to take down his video and then filed a copyright claim against him.

The company made it clear that they aren’t against people sharing videos as long as they are posted after the official release.

“We’re very excited that you’re recording, and we look forward to seeing more after launch,” the official Family Guy: The Quest for Stuff account commented on Kaosu’s video.

We’ve reached out to Fox and TinyCo for further comment, but we were unable to get a comment.

Fox’s copyright claim got Kaosu’s video removed from YouTube, but it didn’t stop with this. Kaosu also broadcasted gameplay of the mobile app on his Twitch account. The publisher filed a complaint with the video livestreaming website, and Twitch responded by closing down Kaosu’s page due to “terms of service violations.”

Kaosu can continue uploading videos on YouTube even with the copyright claim from Fox. That is not the same as a copyright “strike,” which could lead to the site shutting down his account. His Twitch account is currently on suspension. It will reopen after 24 hours.

This isn’t the first time copyright has caused problems for people making videos online. In December, a number of large YouTube channels started finding that they had dozens of copyright strikes as the upload site started cracking down on well-established creators. Oddly, however, many of the complaints came from companies and organizations that do not own the rights to the properties they were claiming. While Fox’s actions aren’t exactly the same, it is yet another example of how YouTube favors other corporations over its users.